Despite a long, hard-fought election campaign, the public rallies to a new chief executive who has come to office riding a tide of national discontent and strong disapproval of his predecessor. His approval
ratings remain high even as he proposes a dramatic new approach to the role of government that has many doubters. Surveys find that Americans think the president’s plan to rescue the nation’s
troubled economy will work, yet many are fearful of key provisions. Indeed, the polls find the president more personally popular than his programs. Further, a wide partisan gap exists in attitudes toward
the nation’s new leader.

The new president described above is, of course, Barack Obama — but, to a startling degree, it is also Ronald Reagan. A close look at Gallup’s polling of reactions to Reagan’s first few
months in office provides striking parallels with what Pew Research Center polls now find about opinions of Mr. Obama. And a consideration of the Reagan experience may well give some clues as to what lies
ahead for the 44th president. Read more…

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle — as Richard Nixon often referred to the French president, a full name he thought resonant of “grandeur, glory, greatness” — was the last
of the great World War II leaders still on the world stage in 1969: former commander of the Free French, peer of Roosevelt and Churchill, and an outsized figure to a young Southern California lawyer and
postwar congressman named Richard Nixon. The new president, as White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman saw it, was simply “in awe” of the French general.

The respect went to personality and politics as well as fame. De Gaulle’s book “The Edge of the Sword” was perhaps the most dog-eared and annotated in Nixon’s personal library. In
its pages he found sanction for both his great-man grandiosity as a politician and the reclusiveness and frail self-image (if not paranoia) that tortured his public career. He vigorously underscored de Gaulle’s
claim that “Great men of action have without exception possessed to a very nigh degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.” As early as the 1960 campaign, not long after the then-vice
president had first met the Frenchman, a CBS reporter, Nancy Dickerson, noted that Nixon had “studied de Gaulle and was trying to emulate him.”

Nixon revered de Gaulle and reveled in his company, but he wouldn’t take the Frenchman’s advice on Vietnam.

Much of the affinity stemmed from the shared disdain of both men for the fractious give-and-take of democratic politics, and for legislatures that dogged their grand strokes. “Parliaments,” de
Gaulle wrote in another passage Nixon underlined, “can paralyze action but not initiate it.” Even before the European trip, Haldeman noted the newly elected president already beginning to distance
himself from the congressional politics and the policy bargaining he detested: “He feels he should be more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious, i.e. de Gaulle…” Read more…

Unlike Barack Obama, Richard Nixon had planned a presidential trip to Europe even before he won the White House. Coming shortly after his inauguration, the tour was to be part of proving him “a master
statesman,” as he described his long-sought role. As it unfolded, the trip had its own portents, a mix of the serious and the petty, of the skill and squalor that were to epitomize Nixon’s
presidency.

He took off from Washington on the morning of Feb. 23, 1969, with trappings of power that came to mark his many travels — a fulsome departure ceremony, White House planes jammed with a party of 300, and
Nixon himself ensconced in his forward office on Air Force One, wearing a maroon smoking jacket and surrounded by bulging blue briefing books emblazoned in gold with the presidential seal. He would sit alone
there for most of the flight, reading and scribbling notes on his ubiquitous yellow legal pads. It was a solitude broken on this trip by only one interruption, and that, too, was indicative of much to come.

For the new president, a foreign trip was a chance to demonstrate his stature as a statesman — and revealed the insecurities that destroyed his career.

Not long before his departure, the North Vietnamese had launched an offensive in central South Vietnam. In the worn rhythm of the Vietnam War, the operation was a predictable counter to intensified attacks by
American forces over the previous three months. But the fighting more than doubled the weekly toll of Americans killed-in-action to 453, and Nixon took it as “a personal slap in the face,”
especially as he began his coveted European tour. They were hardly into the seven-hour flight when the president, furious as he read the latest intelligence, called in his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger. He told Kissinger that they would proceed with a retaliatory project that had been repeatedly urged by the U.S. military: the secret B-52 bombing of North Vietnamese staging areas in neighboring
Cambodia. Read more…

President Obama’s unscheduled visit to Iraq suggests a president determined to see a war zone first hand and draw his own conclusions. Lincoln availed himself of that opportunity during the Civil War,
but the most pertinent example may be Dwight D. Eisenhower, who toured the battlefront in Korea shortly before his inauguration. Ike had pledged to go to Korea if elected, and most voters assumed that the
supreme commander — who had so effectively defeated the German Wehrmacht — would quickly dispatch the North Koreans and their Chinese allies.

Eisenhower may have thought that as well. Republican campaign rhetoric envisaged a unified Korea brought together by force of arms, if necessary, to insure “the future stability of the continent of Asia.”
South Korean president Syngman Rhee shared that view, as did many in the nation’s foreign policy establishment.

Bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq might require President Obama to be like Ike.

Ike spent three days in Korea. He conferred with his old friends, Gen. Mark Clark and Gen. James Van Fleet, talked to division and regimental commanders, and ate C-rations at the front with G.I.’s from
the 15th Infantry — Eisenhower’s old regiment. Most significantly, he flew along the battle line, roughly the 38th Parallel, in an artillery observation plane (the military equivalent of a
Piper Cub) for a good look at the terrain. It was rocky, mountainous and forbidding — bristling with Chinese gun emplacements and heavily fortified. It reminded him of Tunisia during World War II,
where an untested American Army had received its first comeuppance. “It was obvious that any frontal attack would present great difficulties,” said Ike afterwards. Read more…

Perhaps the biggest surprise the Obama administration has faced in its first 100 days has not been the dismal state of the economy or the difficulties abroad with Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, but rather the
grudging cooperation of the Democratic Congress.

The president could take a lesson from L.B.J. on how to bend fractious Congressional Democrats to his will.

Lyndon Johnson could have warned Barack Obama that winning the support of the 535 senators and representatives, even if a majority of them share your party affiliation, wouldn’t be easy. This is especially
the case after eight years of an administration that tried to reinstate the bad old days of the Imperial Presidency — using executive privilege and signing statements to bypass the legislature.
Read more…

President Obama must have been a bit surprised when, on his 54th day in office, the former vice president, Richard Cheney, decided to go on television and brand him a danger to the Republic. “ “He
is,” said Cheney, “making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

That is not the way the game is usually played. Even former President George W. Bush understood that. Speaking two days after Cheney to an audience of 2,000 people in Calgary, Canada, he was, predictably, asked
about Cheney’s remarks and said of his successor:

“He deserves my silence. I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”

From left: New York Times Co./Getty Images; Dennis Cook/AP; Ron Edmonds/APFrom left, former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former president Ronald Reagan, and President Barack Obama.

“Defend me from friends, I can defend myself from my enemies,” is an old European saying, but it’s certainly applicable to many United States presidents. Rebellious conservative Democrats
whom Franklin Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to purge effectively called a halt to the New Deal in 1938. Loyal Republicans voted for Ronald Reagan’s budget in 1981 but joined Democrats in larding
it with so much pork that it greatly expanded federal budget deficits. Now, there are signs that President Obama, for all his early success, could have difficulty keeping Democrats united on his budget proposal
and other economic measures in the face of growing public unease with bank bailouts and the prospect of budgets unbalanced to an extent hitherto unimagined.

Like F.D.R. and Reagan, Obama is finding that a ‘friendly’ Congress can cause some headaches.

F.D.R. had a head of steam after he was re-elected in 1936 in one of the great presidential landslides in history. But he dissipated his broad bipartisan support with an ill-conceived attempt to enlarge the
Supreme Court, which had struck down a number of New Deal measures. By 1938, conservative Democrats were in open revolt, and F.D.R. compounded his difficulties by trying to purge eight Democratic senators
in the party primaries that year. He lost in seven of the eight races. As war clouds gathered in 1940, F.D.R. won re-election again, but the New Deal was over. As Mr. Roosevelt himself put it in 1943, “Old
Doc New Deal” had become “Doctor Win The War.” Read more…

On Nov. 24, 1963, two days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson met with his principal national security advisers to consider the most volatile issue he had inherited: Vietnam.
A coup at the beginning of November — approved by the Kennedy administration — had toppled Ngo Dinh Diem’s government and taken his life. Concerns about the ability of his untested successors
to withstand Vietcong insurgents backed by Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese Communist regime gave Johnson a sense of urgency about an issue that could threaten United States interests abroad and undermine
his standing at home.

Johnson’s first concern was to assure that he was acting in concert with Kennedy’s plans. But no one could provide authoritative advice on J.F.K.’s intentions. By increasing the number of
military advisers in Vietnam from 685 to 16,700, Kennedy had indicated his determination to preserve Saigon’s autonomy. His agreement to a change of government in hopes of finding a leader who could
command greater popular support than Ngo Dinh Diem seemed to confirm Kennedy’s commitment to preventing a Communist victory.

Lyndon Johnson tried to give his nation guns and butter. In the end, he provided neither.

At the same time, however, Kennedy had signaled his intentions to reduce America’s military role in Vietnam by directing that 1,000 of the advisers be brought home by the end of 1963. He had also rejected
requests from his military chiefs for the use of American ground forces in the fighting. In addition, he had told several advisers that he intended to withdraw American military personnel from Vietnam after
the 1964 election. Read more…

It happened to John F. Kennedy just days into his presidency. It will happen to President Obama, too. Probably it already has.

(The Associated Press)John F. Kennedy and Sam Rayburn in December 1960.

The bad news was delivered to Kennedy at breakfast with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Democrat of Texas, who said: “Mr. President, I don’t believe we have the votes …”

The new president, a former member of the House, was shocked. Even presidents believe what they read in the papers, and the conventional wisdom in 1961 was that “Mister Sam” controlled the 263
Democrats in the House. With only 174 Republicans, there should have been more than enough votes to do what Kennedy wanted done: expand the Rules Committee from 12 to 15 members.

By bringing the House Rules Committee in line in 1961, John F. Kennedy turned the Democratic South into Republican territory for decades.

The 12 stood between Kennedy and his agenda. There were eight Democrats and four Republicans on Rules, the committee that controlled the schedule of the House, which meant the Democrats should have had total
control over the release of proposed legislation to debate and voting by the full House. Presidents had the power to command the national debate by summoning press and television coverage. Yet Rayburn —
who had come to the House in 1913 and had been speaker for 16 years — was telling Kennedy that he did not have the power to control what Congress debated. Read more…

About

As Barack Obama readies to take the office of president, which of his predecessors offers the best model for getting off on the right foot? The 100 Days blog seeks to answer just that question during Mr. Obama's
first three months in office. Five presidential biographers will discuss the early days of five 20th-century presidents – Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan – shedding new light on the struggles faced by those men entering the Oval Office and comparing their experiences with those Mr. Obama will face in his first 100 days.